White Girl Bleed a Lot (3 page)

The stories are legion.

February 2010. More than 100 black people broke into fights and caused destruction at a Macy’s department store a few
blocks from city hall.

March 17, 2010. Dozens of black people fight in a clothing store while onlookers laugh and cheer.
⁷

Spring 2010. Police break up a black flash mob in the Tioga-Nicetown section of Philly. Kids were bored and acting stupid, said the reporter. The video tells another story.

July 4, 2010. Hundreds of black people storm the streets of South Philadelphia beating, looting, destroying.
⁸

June 2011. The same weekend Guendelsberger and her pals ran into “nothing much,” more than forty black people in a Philly suburb descended on a Sears and ransacked it in broad daylight. Afterwards, the police chief said he feared for the safety—of the rioters.

July 2011. Stop me if you’ve heard this before—hundreds of black people created an “astonishing” amount of violence at downtown Philadelphia restaurants, hotels, and bars.
⁹

July 4, 2011. Ten black people assault and stab a student from LaSalle University and his dog. The student is still alive, though many people do not know how. The dog probably saved him.
¹⁰

Summer 2011. Jeremy Schenkel recounted the attack on him to CBS3 Eyewitness News. He said the kids were laughing as they beat and kicked him, cheering each other on. “Almost like an admiring group that was following them, just kind of ragging on people, and one of those guys said, ‘It’s not our fault you can’t fight’,” Schenkel recalls.
¹¹

There are so many stories and so many videos that some started setting them to rap music.

This list goes on and on, and none of the reporters seemed to notice the race of the criminals. It was so glaring that hundreds of readers commented online and wanted to know why the newspapers repeatedly refused to identify the race of the attackers. Many of the comments were removed for being racist.

People knew two things were important in all these stories: 1) Large groups of black people were systematically assaulting residents in their town. 2) The media was too heavily invested in
not
talking about the fact that the gangs of violent criminals were entirely black.

A few days after the June 2011 attack on Guendelsberger, news anchors on the local Fox affiliate weighed in. A black TV anchor worried about the “destructive tone” of the comments from people who observed that all the people in these riots were black. She said it was “sad” that people did not recognize the true nature of the violence: young people were to blame, not black people. The guest, a black radio talk show host, said the riots were not racial, and then tried to justify them because the state legislature cut money for job training and increased money for prisons. He said it was not right to blame an entire group for the acts of a few bad people. “When an African American commits a crime,” he said, “society is looking to define race. When Lochner shot [Congresswoman] Giffords, nobody said ‘what is wrong with white men?’ This isn’t a black or white issue; they need things to do.”

It’s classic: they didn’t do it. Here’s why they did it.

They went on to blame young people some more, and despite
overwhelming video evidence, despite the fact that everyone arrested was black, despite every bit of evidence to the contrary, they repeated that it was not about race.

Why couldn’t we see that?

One month later, Philadelphia’s black mayor, Michael Nutter, changed the game. After years of denying and deflecting and condoning, Nutter took to the pulpit of his boyhood church and mentioned the “R” word: Race. In a Sunday speech in July 2011, the mayor admitted his city had a problem with violent
black
people:

You have damaged your own race.

Take those God darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. Nobody.

If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ’cause you look like you’re crazy.
¹²

The head of Philadelphia’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, J. Whyatt Monde-sire, said it “took courage” for Mr. Nutter to deliver the message. “These are majority African-American youths and they need to be called on it,” Mr. Mondesire said.

The black Web site TheGrio.com said “Nutter just seemed so disgusted that he just had to, as he put it, talk about things black people think but won’t say.”
¹³

After years of joining with the mayor in ignoring organized
racial violence, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
congratulated the mayor for moving “quickly against mayhem mobs.”
¹⁴

After Mayor Nutter got religion, so did Guendelsberger: “I am afraid of young, black men now. It’s very annoying because there are a lot of young, black men in Philadelphia. I honestly just wish I could go back to how I was before,” she said.
¹⁵

No folks. To quote the master comic: I am not making this up.

All the kids needed, said the mayor and his crew, was a place to go, something to do. In the big Democrat-controlled cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, Democrats have been singing that song since 1964. I guess they hope one of these days they’ll get it right.

How about bowling? So the Mayor organized a “Teen Night” at a bowling alley for the kids, which was going well until someone got stabbed in a fight after the bowling.
¹⁶

And of course the attacks continued.

On July 29, 2011, a man in hospital scrubs was walking down the street at 2 p.m. Coming towards him were seven black students from Mastery Charter School in Philadelphia. Oprah gave the school $1 million. Not as a reward. The Oprah dollars came before the attacks so that the black children could have shiny new computers and nice uniforms, which they were wearing during the attack. As the man passed the students, they turned and pummeled him. It was all caught on tape from two surveillance cameras. Maybe we’ll see this on the Oprah Network.
¹⁷

At the time, Fox News bragged “this video, which you will only see on Fox,” was a big deal. Fox took it down, but kudos to LiveLink.com for having the foresight to capture the original Fox report.

In 2009 a year before this
racial mob violence started making news, other cases of racial violence were going on at Philadelphia schools. The schools were bending over backwards to overlook it. It got so bad that it took a Department of Justice investigation to make them stop denying it.

In September 2011 two white kids in the Philadelphia community of Port Richmond may or may not have laughed at a black person who may or may not have fallen off a bike. It’s unclear what happened to trigger the event, but what we do know is that a crowd of about forty black people chased the two boys into a nearby house. The
Inquirer
described what happened next:

Inside his house, LaVelle, 37, called to his wife, Kim, 30, to go to their bedroom with their twin 13-month-old boys, Mark and Mason, and to call police. He also ordered his two other sons, 11 and 17, and his nephew, 7, to stay upstairs.

With the two teens hiding in the house, LaVelle, 5 feet 10, 220 pounds, a well-known sports-league organizer and coach in the community, went outside to try to calm the angry mob.

They were standing on his steps. One shouted, “‘Something’s going to happen now!’” LaVelle recalled in an interview Friday at his house. LaVelle got nervous and went back inside, locking his door with a deadbolt.

But the attackers pounded on his front windows and kicked his wooden door so hard, it flew open and some of them entered his house.

“The first guy hits me with a pipe. The second guy knocks me in the face. All I’m hearing is my wife and kids screaming,” said LaVelle, who feared that the next time they saw him, he would be in a casket.

He said that he was able to push the attackers out the door, but then a third man—who had a gun—tried to extend his arm. LaVelle grabbed onto the gunman’s lower arm and shoulder so he couldn’t raise the weapon.
¹⁸

The Port Richmond police arrived, wrote a report, and left. Two hours later, the mob returned and threatened the occupants, trying to intimidate them not to testify in court. And this was just one of a rash of mob attacks on individual homes. In Kansas City the exact same thing was about to happen until the homeowner pulled out a rifle. The crowd went elsewhere to wreak havoc.

Months later, another victim, Anna Taylor, was identified for the first time. She was badly beaten in a Philadelphia race riot and may never fully recover.

The blow that Taylor absorbed was so powerful that she lost a front tooth and its root, and the roots of nearby teeth still may die, her dentist told her. The punch also split her upper lip so severely that much of it was hanging from her face and she was unable to speak.

Taylor’s mother, Peggy, a Germantown social worker, said her daughter needed so many stitches inside and outside her mouth at Hahnemann University Hospital after the assault that “we just couldn’t count them.”

The mob took over South Street that warm Saturday night, the first of spring, as though popping up from nowhere, witnesses said. It seemed to be following the patterns of three similar mobs that had quickly assembled in Center City on March 3, Feb. 16, and Dec. 18.

“They had smiles on their faces as they scared people at random,” Assistant District Attorney Angel Flores said in an interview with
The Inquirer
a week after the March 20 attacks. “They thought that assaulting others was a form of enjoyment.”

Indeed, the young man who hit Taylor was laughing as he punched her and said, “Bam, there’s another one,” according to Taylor. “It was frightening.”
¹⁹

In Atlantic City on July 4, 2011, hundreds of black people were milling around Bally’s Casino on the boardwalk near midnight. Soon there were fights and pandemonium, “people
running for their lives as a man shoots onto the Boardwalk just hours after Atlantic City’s Fourth of July celebration ended.” And of course the whole thing was caught on video, including the shooting.
²⁰

Philadelphia TV reporter Steve Keeley of Fox 29 got so impatient with the bumbling of the ineffectual prosecutor, he demanded he stop using “psycho babble” and start talking about the criminals in a way people can understand.